Labor reporter, union negotiator Helen Fogel dies at 84

Helen Fogel, a well-known labor reporter at the Detroit Free Press and a union official who helped negotiate the first union contract for editorial employees at the Detroit News, has died.

She was 84.

Ms. Fogel died May 16 of pneumonia at a nursing home in Pasadena, Calif, according to her son, Charles Fogel. She had been living until this year in Machiasport, Maine, a couple of hours east of her birthplace in Bangor, Maine.

Charles Fogel noted her deep affection for newspapers, including the Free Press where she worked for many years before leaving to work at the News in the late 1980s. He said that when she was a cub reporter working in Maine Ms. Fogel once interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt.

"My mother started as a reporter in the women's section in 1968. She was among those who went on strike shortly after joining the paper. But she loved the papers and the culture of fierce journalism that was cultivated at them and soon was back on the job," Charles Fogel recalled in an e-mail.

Ms. Fogel covered a variety of beats, including science, but she was best known for her labor coverage.

"Helen had deep sources in the UAW and other labor unions. She was a valuable teammate to younger reporter colleagues – they called her 'Mother Fogel' – during Free Press coverage of the 1987 UAW contract bargaining with Detroit's automakers," said Free Press columnist Tom Walsh, who was then the paper's business editor.

Business reporter John Gallagher recalled working with Ms. Fogel in the months before she left the Free Press.

"She was a great gal, and she was really well-sourced. It was a pleasure working with her," Gallagher said, noting that she was a terrific reporter. "She was just one of the old pros that everybody looked up to."

Lou Mleczko, a former president and administrative officer at the Newspaper Guild of Detroit, had known Ms. Fogel since 1974 when he was a Detroit News reporter and she was helping negotiate the News' first union contract for editorial employees. Mleczko recalled a difficult year of negotiations that included 51 bargaining sessions and two strike deadlines that resulted in a contract in 1975.

Her work on the News contract was noteworthy but so was her position as administrative officer, running the Guild office and bargaining contracts at a variety of newspapers, including the Macomb Daily and Royal Oak Daily Tribune.

Helen Fogel(Photo: Detroit Free Press file photo)

"That was significant because she was the first woman ever to hold that position in Detroit," Mleczko said.

Ms. Fogel had been on leave from her reporting job at the Free Press to serve as administrative officer for the Guild and later returned to reporting.